AI:AM — AI Agents: How Enterprises Make Them Reliable · August 18, 2026

Adam Wenchel, CEO of Arthur, joins Prakash Narayanan and Nathan Labenz to discuss enterprise AI agents, governance, auditability, human oversight, model costs, and where ROI shows up in production. Jonathan Cornelissen, CEO and co-founder of DataCamp, explains personalized AI tutors, adaptive learning, latency, learning outcomes, and the economics of serving millions of learners. The episode opens and closes with wider questions about hidden models, agent speed limits, super apps, and the frontier-model talent race.

Chapters

(0:00) AI ideas can spread like malware.

(0:59) AI bills can hit $400M.

(1:43) AI skills plus communication win.

(2:46) Payment data can expose your identity.

(3:16) Opening and Model 2 report

(7:24) Anthropic's internal Model 2

(9:56) Chip prices and model evidence

(12:34) Governing hidden AI models

(15:22) Recursive self-improvement simulator

(17:35) AI agent speed limits

(21:43) Mind viruses in multi-agent AI

(27:54) Are AI models conscious?

(32:16) Pacing AI delegation

(32:49) Adam Wenchel and Arthur

(35:17) Why Arthur started in 2019

(39:20) AI innovation needs governance

(40:04) Discovering enterprise AI agents

(41:31) Training versus independent oversight

(45:29) AI auditability and observability

(47:56) The cost of AI oversight

(49:52) Smaller models and AI cost

(53:12) Why production models stay expensive

(1:02:59) Enterprise AI sales cycles

(1:05:08) Where is AI ROI?

(1:08:28) AI adoption and reskilling

(1:11:30) Claude versus SaaS software

(1:19:37) Meet Jonathan Cornelissen

(1:23:13) Learning by doing

(1:23:55) Personalized AI tutors

(1:24:48) Measuring learning outcomes

(1:26:30) Adaptive learning pace

(1:27:18) Questions without judgment

(1:29:33) Motivation and flow

(1:36:15) AI tutor architecture

(1:37:19) Latency and voice

(1:40:29) AI career skills

(1:43:32) Scaling tutor costs

(1:49:23) SQL after AI

(1:50:43) Data engineering demand

(1:55:47) Hosted learning playground

(1:57:55) China vs US super apps

(2:01:22) WeChat's ecosystem advantage

(2:02:34) Chinese payments leapfrog cards

(2:05:04) Facebook Libra and data power

(2:07:32) Belief and the AI future

(2:09:57) AI model release fears

(2:11:11) The frontier lab talent race

Guests:

Adam Wenchel — CEO, Arthur (𝕏 | LinkedIn)

Jonathan Cornelissen — CEO & Co-founder, DataCamp (𝕏 | LinkedIn)

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